Contemporary Controls on Terrestrial Carbon Characteristics in Temperate and Sub‐Tropical Australian Wetlands

Abstract

A thorough understanding of controls over terrestrial sedimentary organic carbon characteristics in both the present and the past is pivotal to better understand atmospheric CO₂ pathways into depositional sinks such as peats, swamps, and lakes. We explored the relationship between wetland sediment organic matter storage, climate (precipitation, temperature) and catchment vegetation data (catchment vegetation cover in percent; leaf carbon content in g/m²) by means of multivariate statistical analyses to investigate patterns of carbon deposition in modern wetlands and to provide a more robust framework for interpreting sediment bulk organic geochemistry as a proxy for past carbon cycling. Carbon and nitrogen elemental concentration and stable isotope composition were analyzed from sub-surface sediments at 18 wetlands in eastern Australia. The statistical analyses indicate that variability in geochemical organic matter data in wetland sediments is best explained by geographic differences in catchment vegetation cover and, by inference, the balance of terrestrial versus aquatic organic matter input to the sediment. TOC/TN of aquatic matter may be additionally driven toward higher (terrestrial) values by nitrogen limitation in the catchment and the lakes. These processes explain up to ∼40% of the total variance in the sediment geochemistry (redundancy analyses). Up to ∼10% of the total variance may be attributed to post-depositional processes and organic matter remineralization. The remaining ∼50% of total variance in the data may be attributed to local conditions across the sites, geochemical processes that were not captured in this study, or to the different timescales covered by the sediments at each site.